Wearable devices have become good at telling people when they are stressed. Vancouver’s Prana Labs wants them to help people do something about it.
The startup is behind Vayu, a wearable-first breathwork platform that combines biometric monitoring, artificial intelligence, and haptic feedback to deliver personalized breathing exercises through Apple Watch and Wear OS devices.
Instead of asking users to watch a screen or listen to an audio session, Vayu guides each breath through subtle pulses on the wrist. The platform monitors heart rate variability, or HRV, and adjusts its pacing based on how the user’s body responds.
For founder Dhruv Adhia, the idea began with his own health.
“Vayu started with my own health,” Adhia told Techcouver. “I treated recovery the way I’d treat an engineering problem: real-time biometrics, deliberate breath practice, measured daily.”
Adhia faced metabolic and stress-related problems, including Type 2 diabetes. Drawing on his background in data and human-computer interaction, he began closely tracking his health and says he eventually put the condition into remission as part of a broader recovery effort.
Along the way, he found himself looking for a product that could connect stress detection with an immediate response.
“Meditation apps like Calm and Headspace treat stress with more screen time; wearables like WHOOP and Oura detect stress but leave the fixing to you,” he said.
The tool Adhia wanted did not exist, so he set out to build it.
An SFU PhD candidate with more than 12 years of experience in data and human-computer interaction, Adhia previously co-founded H+ Technology, which was once valued at a peak valuation of $85 million USD before exiting.
At Prana Labs, he partnered with co-founder Deepali Raiththa, a multimedia artist trained at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Raiththa has spent 15 years exploring the relationship between breath and the body, bringing a different perspective to Adhia’s data-driven approach.
“Vayu is where her practice and my data obsession met,” Adhia said.
The platform uses smartwatch sensors to read a user’s heart rate and HRV before guiding breathwork through haptic cues. Its AI layer adapts the pace to the individual, creating a feedback loop between the user’s breathing and physiological response.
“We think of it as an operating system for your nervous system,” Adhia said.
Prana Labs says Vayu is the only platform it knows of combining live biometrics, real-time intervention, and adaptive pacing on smartwatches people already own. Its adaptive control method is patent pending with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The app launched across the iOS and Android ecosystems in late 2025 and early 2026. It has since recorded more than 70,000 downloads across over 15 countries.
Prana Labs recently added some early research to support its approach.
A preprint published on medRxiv details a four-to-six-week naturalistic pilot involving 199 adults across Canada, the United States, and India. Participants completed daily five-to-ten-minute breathing sessions using Vayu’s haptic guidance.
By week four, HRV had increased by a median of 28.6% compared with baseline, while resting heart rate declined by 7.4 beats per minute. Seventy-one percent of active participants maintained at least three sessions per week, and the study also recorded a reduction in perceived stress.
The findings are preliminary. The paper has not yet completed peer review, and its authors note that the HRV measurements came from smartwatch sensors and should be interpreted as relative trends rather than clinical readings.
The pilot was conducted through a collaboration involving Prana Labs and Simon Fraser University’s Metacreation Lab. The paper is now under review at a SAGE journal.
Prana Labs has secured approximately $350,000 in grants and government-backed financing, including support through NRC IRAP, SR&ED, and Innovate BC. The company is also participating in NEXT Canada’s Next AI accelerator.
With early traction and its first pilot results now public, Prana Labs is raising a $1.2-million pre-seed round to expand distribution and continue developing Vayu’s adaptive technology, out of which $350,000 is committed from a number of investors towards this round.
For Adhia and Raiththa, the larger opportunity is to move wearable technology beyond passive measurement. Rather than simply alerting users that they may be stressed, Vayu is designed to respond in the moment—without demanding more of their attention.
The post Vayu by Prana Labs Wants Smartwatches to Do More Than Measure Stress appeared first on Techcouver.com.
Vayu by Prana Labs Wants Smartwatches to Do More Than Measure Stress was first posted on July 27, 2026 at 5:00 am.
©2022 “Techcouver.com“. Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at rob@kitsilano.ca
